I Must Read and Watch this Fun Thing Daily!
Flash card goals are straightforward. Review till 0. Learn 10 new cards a day. This is studying. Set your targets and meet them. Then you try the same thing with immersion. Watch one j-drama a day. Read three manga chapters a day. Watch two episodes of anime a day.
Something feels off, but you can’t figure out what.
Fun converted to obligation
Most of you study Japanese because that’s truly what you want. Obligation learning, or learning where you don’t really have a choice but need to do it for some outside reason, is drastically less effective. Passion learning is where you want to be.
What you truly want is what understanding Japanese will provide. And that’s usually anime, manga, books, TV and movies. Immersion is practicing what you already enjoy. But since your level is still in development, you can’t enjoy it yet in the natural way you would once you are fluent.
Immersion contains studying. Studying that is absolutely necessary for progress. You can’t become fluent in Japanese solely by studying from textbooks. So your fun gets converted to obligation.
Think about Netflix
You probably were thinking about it anyway. You open Netflix in delight. You browse, binge and repeat. You have to work hard to not watch too much.
Now imagine you had a daily Netflix to-do list. You must watch 3 comedies, 2 anime, 1 romance story, and 1 fantasy. You must do this every day, checking off each item.
Now imagine in addition to your daily list were shows that involved extra work and thinking. You had to watch history documentaries to improve your history knowledge and cooking shows to improve your recipe skills. You were going to be tested on them afterwards.
The second someone tells you what you must do, how much you must do it, and the ultimate reasoning behind it, fun decreases.
Solving the conflict
Obvious solution: don’t create a daily list of content you must consume. Just consume it.
The opposite of the daily requirement is the following attitude:
Everyday I’ll just watch and read as much fun Japanese as possible!
– What everyone says at some pooint
This can work… for some people. But for other people this is a goal-less hell. You can’t keep track of things. You can’t check things off. How do you start without an end? That’s like saying “I’ll learn flash cards daily” and expecting results.
The only solution: figure which (or combination of) works best for you. Whatever you can do to get yourself enjoying immersion daily – you do that. Ignore what anyone else says.
The natural progression out of this
There is good news though, I promise. This is 100% temporary.
As your Japanese gets better, this becomes a non-issue. This whole situation is tough because whatever you are trying to enjoy also involves work. However, over time the work decreases, and the fun increases. And this all happens way before you are fluent.
The natural urge to watch or read something you would enjoy no longer contains traces of “but I have to work at this…” It becomes Netflix – you want Netflix. Give yourself time to get there.
How do you handle it?
Do you set content goals? Do you just try to enjoy what you can daily? Which has worked for you?
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Another great article that perfectly captures the dynamic between setting content goals and just enjoying the content. As you say it really just depends on the person and their skill level for what works.
For me I have really been enjoying content goals. It pushes me and I can check things off a list. If I hit my goal I don’t hesitate to keep going further too. I am excited for the day though my Japanese is good enough that a goal is no longer required to keep me on track and I just consume like it’s second nature. For now though the cognitive work of watching Japanese only is still a high enough that it still feels like work to some degree even if I enjoy it.
The best place to be is having your Japanese good enough that a content goal is no longer needed.
Reaching that is a significant milestone.
I fall more on the “try to get as much immersion in as possible” side. Whenever I try to make it a strict goal it quickly turns into a chore which makes it unfun which makes me stop.
As I am otherwise a very structured person, e.g. for anki the clear goal of hitting 0 every day clearly pushes me, this is a bit surprising to me (this article made me reflect that!) It is interesting to see how different the approach for the different parts of the journey needs to be.
Great point about different approaches for different parts. That’s very true, even when you feel like “I study best by doing X, so I’m going to do every part with X”